Introduction

Interviewing for a role where you get to support a staff team as a supervisor?

Perfect! Whether or not evaluation shows-up in the actual job description, you must think about evaluation and here’s why:

1 |  Aspects of evaluation can excite teams, pushing them to test-out a new practice, idea, or hunch.
2 |  Informing decision-making in diverse contexts — including administration, programming, volunteerism, coalition-building, and so forth — can improve your strategies.
3 |  Stimulate solution-building conversations by collectively identifying which procedures the team engages with most often and that also have the most  kinks. 

This 2 Tips gives you two ways to jump on this idea!

Tip 2

Provide three interesting examples to the interviewers that paint a picture about the differences and meaningfulness of each type of evaluation, process versus impact, in order to show your excitement and potentially educate interviewers who are not aware of the different types of evaluation.

Vocabulary

These terms will help you to clearly convey your ideas and reflections no matter who is sitting across from you at the interviewing table or on the other side of the phone call. Be sure to adjust wording based on the authentic language choices of the team with whom you’re interviewing.

Data: Information that conveys insights about activities, processes, and people.

Process evaluation: Exploring activities that have procedural steps (that come together for a specific purpose) in order to advance the effectiveness and efficiency of those steps. These types of evaluations are often used for assessing operational features of a program or organization such as outreach, enrollment, financial audits, human resources.

Impact evaluation: Assessing the transformation, and reach of that transformation, that was initiated through programming or services that are honed for advancing the lives of groups or the workings of systems. These types of evaluations are often used for understanding how powerful of a change agent a specific program, service, or action is.

Analysis: Organizing, summarizing, comparing, and interpreting the available data. The function of data analysis is making meaning out of data.

Evaluation reporting: Putting together a simple way to communicate the process of evaluation that was undertaken while highlighting the results of the evaluation. Reporting may materialize as a lengthy report, infographic, annual report, public presentation.